Autocrats north and south, revisited

About a year and a half ago I posted a comparison of the post-presidential careers of Donald Trump and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, pointing out that while Brazil still had problems to face, Bolsonaro had been “reduced, if not quite to irrelevance, then to a much less omnipresent role than his northern counterpart.” In words that cut even deeper today, I suggested that to readers in the United States the story of Brazil “may sound like a sort of utopian fantasy.”

Now a more credentialled expert, politics professor Omar Encarnación, has taken on the topic. In an article published last week in Foreign Affairs, Encarnación argues that “Trump in many ways aligned U.S. politics with the Latin American caudillismo tradition,” and that in office he and Bolsonaro “became mirror images of each other.”

Their shared approach to power included attacking the press, undermining judicial independence, promoting Christian nationalism, persecuting political foes, sowing doubts about the legitimacy of the electoral system, and attempting to stay in office by undemocratic means.

Why, then, have their subsequent fortunes been so different? According to Encarnación, the main reason is that Brazil’s relatively recent experience of dictatorship makes its people, both leaders and ordinary citizens, much more sensitive to the threat: “the need to protect democracy is felt much more deeply.”

In the United States, a broad swath of voters and politicians appear unconcerned by the threat that a caudillista leader poses to democracy. But in Brazil there is a keen sense of what it means for a country to lose its democracy.

When Bolsonaro was elected, many observers (including me) worried that Brazil’s institutions were more fragile than those of the US, and that therefore the future of constitutional government was more uncertain. Encarnación turns that argument on its head, saying that their very fragility makes those institutions – and the people who run them – less forgiving of any attempt to overthrow them.

He could also have used South Korea as an example, where, as we noted just recently, the opposition is doing everything it can to ensure that president Yoon Suk-yeol is not given a second chance to seize power by force. (A second attempt last week to arrest him was successful.) Not that there’s anything to say that established democracies can’t hold former presidents accountable: France is currently doing so with the corruption trial of Nicholas Sarkozy.

Encarnación also points out, as I had, the structural factors at work, particularly the electoral college and the institutionalised two-party system. The first multiplied the opportunities for Trump to sow doubt about the 2020 result and marshal his supporters to overturn it; the second gave him a ready-made support base and left dissenters with nowhere to go unless they were willing to embrace their historic opponents.

In Brazil, by contrast, the electoral college was an artifact of the dictatorship and was abolished with democratisation in 1988. And its much more flexible party system meant that Bolsonaro could be more easily disowned by his allies; the established centre-right parties largely supported him in office but had no personal loyalty to him. Instead of taking over a large existing party he had to change party several times in the search for a suitable base.

Remedying those features of the American system will not be easy, and in any case structural change can only do so much. What’s really needed, as Encarnación makes clear, is public commitment to democracy and a willingness to defend it against its enemies. That’s what so far has been lacking: “the rhetoric of protecting democracy ultimately fails in the United States because most Americans cannot fathom what it would mean for their democracy to wither or die.”

Let’s hope they do before it’s too late.